Free Bertha Rochester protest rally

The Morley Observer & Advertiser announces that the following will take plce at the upcoming Morley Literature Festival (October 6):

A Brontë-themed lunch will take place at the Village Hotel, Tingley, complete with a three course lunch. (James Carney) 

The Seattle Times reviews the new Madame Bovary film version by Sophie Barthes, recently screened at the TIFF:

Barthes’ vision is a traditional one (though a fair bit of plot is trimmed, to make the film a tidy two hours), with Mia Wasikowska in the title role, and it looks gorgeous — wet green fields, candlelit interiors, ravishing gowns that seem to plaintively illustrate how desperately Emma wants to be surrounded by beauty. Though Wasikowska’s beginning to make a specialty of nineteenth-century literary films (i.e. “Jane Eyre”), her Emma here is no Brontë heroine; she’s petulant, flat-voiced, and intriguingly guarded. (Moira MacDonald)

Janet Quin-Harkin, author of the Heartbreak Café series, reminds us of the origins of the modern YA genre in The Guardian:

Then around 1980 publishers in the USA had a bright idea. They began publishing paperback series, aimed at teenagers, mostly girls. These were books about other teens, like themselves. About ordinary girls, problems with which every teen could identify, romances every teen believed could be possible… and usually happy endings (although most of us do like a good cry too). Some of the books were funny, some were sad, just like real life.
What this meant was that for the first time the reader was the consumer. Teens could let publishers know what they wanted to read. Every teen had enough money to buy the books for about the same price as a movie ticket, and they bought them in hundreds of thousands.
Of course some teachers and librarians complained that they weren't Jane Eyre. So what?
Some of them were well written AND it meant that teens who would not have been readers were devouring books. It was rather like the Harry Potter phenomenon when every child was suddenly reading 700 page books.

The Asian Age interviews the actress Sonam Kapoor:

No matter how many modern authors I read I can never not re-read the Brontë sisters or Gone With The Wind, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens… these are works you can keep going back to. And if you ask me as an actor, reading gives me so much. These are all such different stories and characters from different times saying and representing different things. For example, I read Gone Girl a couple of years back and although it was the most amazing pulp fiction I had read in years, it made me question what love is really like. I was horrified at what people can do to each other. And then I decided on a whim to read Jane Eyre again and discovered romance all over again!” (Nandini D. Tripathy)

The Huffington Post reviews the play The Wayside Motor Inn by A.R. Gurney:

They are followed by Phil and Sally, two undergrads who are splurging on a motel room for a night of uninterrupted sex. Phil has brought The Joy of Sex and some marijuana; Sally has brought Jane Eyre and refuses the joint. The last person to check in is Andy, a doctor who has recently taken a new job in Pennsylvania and is being divorced by his wife Ruth who did not want to uproot their school-age children and move from Boston with him. (Wilborn Hampton)

The Guardian reviews In Search of Solace by Emily Mackie:

This is the Pauper's Inn, and within lurks Fat Sal, proprietress, talking about love and Wuthering Heights with her young employee, Lucy. She leaps before us almost too vividly, a terrifying mixture of appetite and comfort, for Mackie's nouns are choice, her verbs springy, and we are always in the present tense: "Sal's lips are wrapped round her sandwich, her teeth tearing another bite of bacon. As she pulls away, a gloop of ketchup is left in the corner of her mouth. She wipes it with a finger and pops the finger between her lips. 'Romantic?' she suggests. Her mouth is full yet she pushes the word out." (Kate Clanchy)

Financial Times reviews the novel He Wants by Alison Moore:

The plot (well, sort-of plot) turns on the reappearance in Lewis’s life of a bad-boy (well, sort-of bad-boy) school contemporary called Sydney (“like the capital of Australia”; “Sydney’s not the capital of Australia”). Sydney – grey-stubbled, skinny, shifty – is no sort of Heathcliff but he has come to represent a freedom that Lewis still covets; a freedom itself now framed not by the possibility of roads to be taken but by regret at those it’s too late to take. (Sam Leith)

The Daily Telegraph (Australia) talks about the Get Caught Reading campaign:

Reading, to me, is the most magical means of escape from life available to us. Forget movies, TV, internet shopping — losing yourself in a good novel is still the most effective way of shedding life’s worries.
Feel a little lovelorn? Dive into Pride and Prejudice, or devour Wuthering Heights, depending on whether you’re the kind of girl who wants a good or thoroughly bad lover. (Kerry Parnell) 

More campaigns or challenges. Dawn (Pakistan) talks about the 10-book challenge:

The challenge itself was deceptively straightforward: nominate friends to compile a list of ten books that had sustained a long-term effect on them. The nominee in turn was expected to nominate another ten friends from their list and so it continued – an excellent idea indeed, and I personally extracted tremendous enjoyment out of scanning the lists of many people.
Alarm bells, however, started to ring when in many cases I struggled to find a single non-white, non-British writer on the 10-book list. The usual suspects, ranging widely over the centuries, were pervasive: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, William Shakespeare, Enid Blyton and Thomas Hardy topped the charts as it were. (Dr Gohar Karim Khan)

Kit O'Connell's Cartoon Friday Watercooler recommends the Cartoon Hangover short, Blackford Manor:

A bit of playful, gothic horror for you tonight! I enjoyed this short film’s silly send-up of all those Brontë-esque tropes.

But what we really loved it was the caption of one of the picture:

Free Bertha Rochester protest rally outside the East Wing.

The Globe and Mail interviews the writer Eliza Robertson:

What agreed-upon classic do you despise?
I have never read anything by Jane Austen, so I don’t despise Pride and Prejudice, but I do think that gap on my shelf is notable. I generally dislike Victorian novels. I find them rangy and overwritten. But Wuthering Heights really shook me, so perhaps I haven’t given them their due. Generally, I prefer contemporary work.

And The Sun publishes an interview with Alice Munro:

What is important to you when you tell a story?
Well, obviously, in those early days, the important thing was the happy ending –I did not tolerate unhappy endings, for my heroines, anyway. And later on, I began to read things like Wuthering Heights, and very very unhappy endings would take place, so I changed my ideas completely and went in for the tragic, which I enjoyed.

Dcist has a funny story overheard at D.C.:

On a Red Line train toward Glenmont:
An elderly, vibrant, redheaded woman is dressed in exotic clothes and jewelry that suggest she is a world traveler. A father gets on the subway car with his son, who appears to be about four-years-old. The cheerful little boy is chatting with his dad and then starts a conversation with the woman.
Boy: "What is your name?"
Woman: "Jane."
Boy: "Why do you have a boy's name like James?"
Woman: "No, it's Jane. Like Jane Austen or Jane Eyre."
Boy gives a blank look.
Woman: "Like Jane in the marvelous Tarzan books written by Burroughs!"
Four-year-old boy continues to give the blank look.
Woman to father: "Good heavens! Don't children read books anymore?" (Andrew Wiseman)

Zimbabwe Independent (Zimbabwe) visited Angus, Scotland:

Barrie’s home is open to the public as a museum and there’s a splendid little general museum with helpful staff. A Peter Pan statue is prominent in the market square and, although a local pub is called the (Captain) Hook Hotel, the town doesn’t go over the top about its most famous son. Peter Pan-ism isn’t in your face constantly like, say, the Brontë sisters are at Haworth, Yorkshire or the orgy of Flopsy Bunny-ism found at Beatrix Potter’s former home village in Cumbria. (Dusty Miller)

Blogtaormina (Italy) has been to Haworth:

Libertà dal maschilismo patriarcale, emancipazione e consapevolezza del proprio ruolo, questo è il messaggio che resta impresso, leggendo i romanzi delle sorelle Brontë. Una letteratura che già allora ebbe notevole consenso di pubblico e che ancora oggi, esercita tutto il suo fascino, considerate anche le numerose trasposizioni cinematografiche che ne sono state fatte. Una letteratura evocativa che spinge gli appassionati a fare pellegrinaggi in quei luoghi. Lo Yorkshire, la brughiera, sono l’ispirazione e la scena dei romanzi, con il piccolo borgo di Haworth, immerso nelle vastità dell’Inghilterra settentrionale, vicino alle cittadine di Halifax e Bradford. Qui trascorsero l’esistenza, sostenute dalla loro fervida immaginazione, le sorelle Emily, Charlotte e Anne. Circondate da un paesaggio selvaggio e isolate dal resto del mondo ma con il sostegno della lettura e della scrittura; libere di varcare qualsiasi tipo di confine ma trasfondendo nelle loro opere, quelle atmosfere e quei paesaggi. (Read more) (Lisa Machis) (Translation)

Rheinische Post (Germany) talks about the German translation of Astrid Lindgren's The Six Bullerby Children (aka The Children of Noisy Village):

Das Buch heißt "Wir Kinder aus Bullerbü", und der Ort, an dem seine Geschichten spielen, gehört zu den großen Sehnsuchtslandschaften. Er liegt auf der imaginären Karte der Weltliteratur gleich neben Marcel Prousts Combray und dem magischen Gondal der Geschwister Brontë. (Phillipp Holstein) (Translation)

Origo (Hungary) discusses the evolution of the Hungarian curriculum:

Pedig a világban történt egy és más az elmúlt 36 évben. Ki hinné, hogy a mai, sokak számára megkérdőjelezhetetlen kánon az 1978-as oktatási reformnak köszönhető? Akkor a Poszler György vezette irodalmi csoport rést ütött a magyartanítás ideológiai szemléletén, és olyan, korábban mellőzött nagys(Scheer Katalin) (Translation)
ágokat emelt be a tantervbe, mint Dosztojevszkij, Bulgakov, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dickens vagy Brontë.

Keighley News reports the Microsoft Pro Surface 3 Brontë Sisters portrait by James Mylne that was in the news a few days ago. La mesilla de noche (in Spanish) and Quite as a Mouse review Jane Eyre. Writergurlny does the same with Wuthering Heights.

EDIT: Finally, an alert from Tucumán, Argentina. The opera-rock Cumbres Borrascosas by Hernán Espinosa will be performed tonight (22.00hrs, Centro Cultural Virla) as a part of the II Jornadas Nacionales de Teatro Argentino.